Drive Nature out of the door and she will fly in at the
window, exclaims the
Cadet Rech[2] in a recent editorial. This valuable admission of
the official organ of our counter revolutionary liberals needs to be
particularly emphasised, because what is referred to is the nature
of the Russian revolution. And one cannot sufficiently insist on the force
with which events are confirming the basic view of Bolshevism as to this
“nature” of the peasant bourgeois revolution, which cm
win only in opposition to wavering, wobbling,
counter-revolutionary bourgeois liberalism.

At the beginning of 1906, prior to the First Duma, Mr. Struve wrote:
“The peasant in the Duma will be a Cadet.” At that time this
was the bold assertion of a liberal who still dreamt of
re-educating the muzhik from a naïve monarchist into a supporter of
the opposition. It was at a time when
Russkoye Gosudarstvo,[3] the organ of the bureaucracy, the
newspaper of the lackeys of Mr. Witte, was assuring its readers that
“the muzhik will help us out”, i.e., that broad representation
of the peasants would prove favourable for the autocracy. Such opinions
were so widespread in those days (remote days! two whole years divide us
from them!) that even in the Mensheviks’ speeches at the
Stockholm Congress[4] kindred notes were clearly heard.

But the First Duma had dispelled these illusions of the monarchists and
the illusions of the liberals completely. The most ignorant,
undeveloped, politically virgin, unorganised muzhik proved to be
incomparably more left than
the Cadets.[5] The struggle of the Cadets against the “Trudovik
spirit” and
Trudovik politics’s[6] formed the main content of liberal
“activity” during the first two Dumas. And when
after the Second Duma had been dissolved, Mr. Struve—an advanced man
among the liberal counter-revolutionaries— hurled his angry
judgements on the Trudoviks, and proclaimed a crusade against the
“intellectualist” leaders of the peasantry who were
“playing at radicals”, he was there by expressing the utter
bankruptcy of liberalism.

The experience of the two Dumas brought liberalism a complete
fiasco. It did not succeed in “taming the muzhik”. It
did not succeed in making him modest, tractable, ready for compromise with
the landlord autocracy. The liberalism of the bourgeois lawyers, professors
and other intellectualist trash could not “adjust itself” to
the “Trudovik” peasantry. It turned out to be politically and
economically far behind them. And the whole historic significance
of the first period of the Russian revolution may be summed up as follows:
liberalism has already conclusively demonstrated its
counter-revolutionary nature, its incapacity to lead the peasant
revolution; the peasantry has not yet fully understood that it is
only along the path of revolution and republic, under the guidance of the
socialist proletariat, that a real victory can be won.

The bankruptcy of liberalism meant the triumph of the reactionary
landlords. Today, intimidated by those reactionaries, humiliated and spat
upon by them, transformed into a serf-bound accomplice of Stolypin’s
constitutional farce, liberalism will shed an occasional tear for the
past. Of course the fight against the Trudovik spirit was hard, unbearably
hard. But ... all the same ... may we not win a second time, if that spirit
rises again? May we not then play the part of a broker more successfully?
Did not our great and famous Pyotr Struve write, even before the
revolution, that the middle parties always gained from the sharpening of
the struggle between extremes?

And lo, the liberals, exhausted in struggle with the Trudoviks, are
playing against the reactionaries the card of a revival of the Trudovik
spirit! “The Land Bills just introduced into the Duma by the
Right-wing peasants and the clergy,” writes Rech in the same
editorial, “reveal the old Trudovik spirit: Trudovik and not
Cadet.” “One Bill belongs to the peasants and is signed by 41
members of the Duma. The other belongs to the clergy. The former is more
radical than the latter, but the latter, too, in some respects [listen to
the Cadet Rech!] leaves the Cadet draft of agrarian reform far
behind.” The liberals are obliged to admit that, alter all the
filtering of the electors undertaken and carried out in accordance with the
notorious law of June 3, this fact (as we already noted in No. 22 of
Proletary) is evidence not of some accident, but of the
nature of the
Russian revolution.[1]

The peasants, writes Rech, have a distributable land reserve
not in the sense of a transmitting agency, “but in the sense of a
permanent institution”. The Cadets admit this, but modestly keep
silent about the fact that they themselves, while playing up to the
reactionaries and cringing to them, in the interim between the First and
Second Dumas threw the distributable land reserve out of their programme
(i. e., in one way or another, the recognition of land nationalisation) and
adopted
Gurko’s[7] point of view, namely, full private ownership of the land.

The peasants, writes Rech, buy land at a fair valuation
(i. e., in the Cadet fashion) but—and a momentous “but”
this is—the valuation is to be made by the local land institutions
“elected by the whole population of the locality concerned”.

And once again the Cadets have to keep quiet about one aspect. They
have to keep quiet about the fact that this election by the whole
population obviously resembles the well-known “Trudovik” Bill
in the First Duma and the Second—the Bill providing for local land
committees elected on the basis of universal, direct and equal suffrage by
secret ballot. They have to keep quiet about how the liberals in the first
two Dumas carried on a disgusting struggle against this Bill, which was the
only possible one from a democratic point of view: how abjectly they turned
and twisted, wishing not to say from the Duma rostrum everything
they had said in their press—in the leading article of Rech
later reprinted by Milyukov ("A Year of Struggle”), in
Kutler’s draft and in Chuprov’s article (the Cadet
“Agrarian Question”, Volume 2). And what they admitted in their
press was that according to their idea the
local land committees should consist of an equal number of representatives
of the peasantry and of the landlords, with a representative of the
government, as a third party. In other words, the Cadets were
betraying the muzhik to the landlord, by assuring that everywhere the
latter would have the majority (the landlords plus a representative of the
landlord autocracy are always in a majority against the peasants).

We quite understand the swindlers of parliamentary bourgeois liberalism
having to keep quiet about all this. They are wrong, thought in
thinking that the workers and peasants are likely to forget these most
important landmarks on the road of the Russian revolution.

Even the clergy—those ultra-reactionaries, those Black-Hundred
obscurantists purposely maintained by the government—have gone
further than the Cadets in their agrarian Bill. Even they have begun
talking about lowering the “artificially inflated prices” of
land, and about a progressive land tax in which holdings not exceeding the
subsistence standard would be free of tax. Why has the village
priest— that policeman of official orthodoxy—proved to be
more on the side of the peasant than the bourgeois liberal?
Because the village priest has to live side by side with the peasant, to
depend on him in a thousand different ways, and some times—as when
the priests practice small-scale peasant agriculture on church
land—even to be in a peasant’s skin himself. The village priest
will have to return from the most police-ridden Duma into his own village:
and however greatly the village has been purged by Stolypin’s
punitive expeditions and chronic billeting of the soldiery, there is no
return to it for those who have taken the side of the landlords. So it
turns out that the most reactionary priest finds it more difficult than the
enlightened lawyer and professor to betray the peasant to the landlord.

Yes, indeed! Drive Nature out of the door and she will fly in at the
window. The nature of the great bourgeois revolution in peasant Russia is
such that only the victory of a peasant uprising, unthinkable without the
proletariat as guide, is capable of bringing that revolution to victory in
the teeth of the congenital counter revolutionism of the bourgeois
liberals.

It remains for the liberals either to disbelieve the strength of the
Trudovik spirit—and that is impossible when the facts stare them in
the face—or else to pin their faith on some new political
trickery. And here is the programme of that piece of trickery in the
concluding words of Rech:
"Only serious practical provisions for this kind of reform [namely,
agrarian reform “on the broadest democratic basis"] can cure the
population of utopian attempts.” This may be read as
follows. Mr. Stolypin, Your Excellency, even with all your gallows and your
June Third laws you have not “cured” the population of its
“utopian Trudovik spirit”. Allow us to try just once more. We
shall promise the people the widest democratic reform, and in practice will
“cure” them by means of buying out the land from the landlords
and giving the latter a majority in the local land institutions!

On our part, we shall thank Messrs. Milyukov, Struve and Co. from the
bottom of our hearts for the zeal with which they are “curing”
the population of its “utopian” belief in peaceful
constitutional methods. They are curing it and, in all probability, will
effect a final cure.

Notes

[2]Rech (Speech)—a daily newspaper, central organ of
the Constitutional-Democratic Party, published in St. Petersburg from
February 1906. It was closed down by the Military Revolutionary Committee
of the Petrograd Soviet on October 26 (November 5), 1917.

[3]Russkoye Gosudarstvo (The Russian State)—a
government newspaper founded by S. Witte, published in St. Petersburg from
February 1(14) to May 15(28), 1906.

[4]The Stockholm Congress— the Fourth (Unity) Congress of the
R.S.D.L.P., was held in Stockholm on April 10-25 (April 23-May 8), 1906. It
was attended by 112 voting delegates representing 57 local organisations of
the Party, and 22 delegates with a consultative voice. In addition there
were representatives from the national Social-Democratic parties of Poland
and Lithuania, Latvia and the Bund. Many Bolshevik organisations had been
smashed up by the government after the armed uprising of December 1905 and
were unable to send their delegates to the Congress. The Mensheviks had a
majority (albeit a small one) at the Congress.

Lenin spoke at the Congress on the agrarian question, the current
situation, the tactics in regard to the elections to the Duma, the armed
uprising and other issues.

The preponderance of Mensheviks at the Congress determined the
character of its decisions. On a number of questions the Congress adopted
Menshevik resolutions (the agrarian programme, the attitude towards the
Duma, etc.).

The Congress adopted Lenin’s formulation of Clause I of the Party
Rules dealing with Party membership. It admitted to membership of the
R.S.D.L.P. the non-Russian Social-Democratic organisation of Poland and
Lithuania and the Lettish S.D.L.P., and laid down the conditions on which
the Bund could join the R.S.D.L.P.

The Central Committee elected at the Congress consisted of three
Bolsheviks and seven Mensheviks The editorial board of the Central Organ
was formed entirely of Mensheviks.

The work of this Congress was analysed by Lenin in his Report on the
Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. (see present edition, Vol. 10,
pp. 317-82).

[5]Cadets—members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, the
chief party of the Russian liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie. The Cadet Party
was founded in October 1905, its membership consisting of representatives
of the bourgeoisie, Zemstvo functionaries from among the landlords, and
bourgeois intellectuals. Among the more prominent Cadet leaders were
P. N. Milyukov, S. A. Muromtsev, V. A. Maklakov, A. I. Shingaryov,
P. B. Struve and F. I. Rodichev. The Cadets called themselves the “party
of the people’s freedom” in order to mislead the working masses. In
reality they never went beyond the demand for a constitutional
monarchy. Their main task they considered to be the fight against the
revolutionary movement, and they aimed at sharing the power with the tsar
and the feudalist landlords.

During the First World War the Cadets actively supported the tsarist
government’s foreign policy of conquest. During the
bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 they tried to save the
monarchy. In the bourgeois Provisional Government, where they held key
positions, they pursued a counter-revolutionary policy opposed to the
interests of the people but favourable to the U. S., British and French
imperialists. After the victory of the October Socialist Revolution the
Cadets were the sworn enemies of the Soviet power and participated in all
armed counter-revolutionary actions and the campaigns of the
interventionists. When the interventionists and whiteguards were defeated
the Cadets fled the country and continued their anti-Soviet
counter-revolutionary activity from abroad.

[6]Trudovik politics (from the word
trud—"labour”)—this refers to the Trudovik group of
petty-bourgeois democrats formed from peasant deputies to the First Duma in
April 1906. At the start of the Duma proceedings this group united 107
deputies. In the Second Duma the Trudoviks had 104, in the Third 14 and in
the Fourth 10 deputies. The Trudoviks demanded the abolition of all class
and national restrictions, the democratisation of the Zemstvo and urban
self-governing bodies, and the introduction of universal suffrage in the
elections to the Duma. Their agrarian programme was based on the Narodnik
principles of equalised land tenure—the establishment of a distributable
land fund consisting of state, crown, and monastery lands as well as
privately-owned lands where they exceeded an established trudovoy,
or labour, norm; compensation was envisaged for alienated land under
private ownership. The implementation of the agrarian reform was to be
entrusted to the local peasant committees.